1M Californians exhaust jobless benefits

Gema Medina (left) collects information from Kasey Cheal of Love Right Home Care of San Diego on April 19 at a job fair sponsored by North County Career Centers in Carlsbad, California.
— Eduardo Contreras

Gema Medina (left) collects information from Kasey Cheal of Love Right Home Care of San Diego on April 19 at a job fair sponsored by North County Career Centers in Carlsbad, California.
— Eduardo Contreras

The number of people who have exhausted all available unemployment insurance benefits has surpassed 1 million.

In total, there are 1,044,000 Californians who have used up all of the weekly checks, the state Employment Development Department announced this week. At one point a person could receive up to 99 weeks of unemployment insurance through a series of federal extensions.

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The standard state unemployment insurance length is 26 weeks, at $40 to $450 per week.

The maximum now is 73 weeks because the state's unemployment rate fell enough last year so that it no longer qualified for the longest extension. But the federal government will stop paying extensions on Dec. 28, 2013, unless Congress and President Obama again agree to continue the program. The extensions became available to Californians in June 2008.

The fact that people have exhausted more than a year of the unemployment benefits exemplifies the issue of long-term unemployment. While the jobless rate across the nation has been falling, the percentage of people who have been unemployed for 26 weeks or longer has hovered around 40 percent of those unemployed.

Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego, said there's some bias in the job market against people who have been unemployed for a long-time. Also, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill last year that would have made unemployment status a protected classification in job interviews in California.

Gin said losing unemployment checks also has an economic affect because generally people spend most of the money they take in.

"Those people don’t have that support anymore," he said.

Federal extension checks are being reduced 17 percent due to sequestration, the $1.2 trillion of automatic across-the-board spending cuts over 10 years that kicked in earlier this year. That changes the weekly check range from $33 to $371 after the standard 26 weeks.

There are nearly as many Californians currently getting unemployment as there are who have exhausted all of their benefits. The state reports that there are 988,000 people in California still on unemployment, more than half of who are on the state-based 26 weeks. In San Diego County, there were 61,538 people on unemployment in February, the latest month of data available from the EDD.

The national unemployment rate in April was a seasonally adjusted 7.5 percent, the BLS reports.

San Diego County's unemployment rate in March fell to a nonadjusted 7.7 percent, a low since December 2008. California's was a seasonally adjusted 9.4 percent.